Saturday, December 18, 2010

OneTrueFan has been added to my blog. I added because I would love to be able to get more feedback from people who visit and read my blog. I appreciate everyone who stops by even those who disagree with me and the things I believe. This is why I have an open policy for those who comment. You can say anything you want and interact as you see fit. I've implemented OneTrue fan because it allows even more reader interaction. IF you look at the bottom of the browser as you scroll down you'll see a window that allows people to join the service for free and share the links that they have shared from the blog.

Readers earn points for coming to your site each day, reading content, sharing links and driving traffic to your site. The ten readers with the most points show up in a leaderboard, but those points only last for 14 days. Readers need to keep coming back because fanship is an ongoing process.

I think what I would like to do sometime in 2011 is offer prizes to readers in the reader board. I'll make an announcement when I know more information. Please feel free to follow the link below to learn more about the OneTrueFan service. Maybe you might like to add the service to your own blog(s).

Infragistics® Analytics Framework gives all of the Infragistics controls for Silverlight (both in their line of business and data visualization toolsets) support for the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF). Infragistics has gone farther than many other component vendors in implementing custom extensions for key controls that let you track the detailed user behaviors of these controls, and their framework has a lighter footprint that makes it easier to deploy with your Rich Internet Applications. You can learn more about the Infragistics Analytics Framework at www.infragistics.com, or right here as I walk you through some of its key features.
Read more about the superior Web Analytics for Silverlight supported by the Infragistics Analytics Framework.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The code shows how to implement currency masking (format like $21,900) in Silverlight DataGrid using the IValueConverter. User can edit the data in numbers with out entering the commas.
Having knowledge in Silverlight data binding to DataGrid is enough to understand the code.
Create a simple Silverlight application in Visual Studio and create a class implementing the IValueConverter in the Silverlight project created in the solution, to use the class as value converter to render the values to datagrid cells in the required format.

In one of my projects we are using PDF templates for the generating the PDF files. Like we create a template first with the textboxes on it and later we can use the template with filling the dynamic data and saving the resulting file. The issue was with the dynamic data not fitting in to the textboxes when the data from database is in Capital Letters. As we were not using the mono spaced fonts like courier. Mono spaced font takes equal number of points while printing on screen or paper say 8X12 pixels for all characters it may be ‘I’ or ‘W’. But non mono spaced font will take different width for different characters to save space, like ‘I’(may be say 3 pixels) will take less width on paper or screen than ‘W’(say 12pixels). And also capital letters take more width than small case. Got it?
There are more than 10 textboxes on my PDF for a paragraph like content to show on the PDF to look like lines of running text. Initially I set the line length to some 100 characters for each line in my code like if the text to show is 400 characters I was displaying in 4 lines. My issue was it is giving space on right side of the PDF textbox when text is in small letters. Then I increased number of characters to show from 100 to 120. Then the issue was with the uppercase text it was concatenated as the textbox width on the PDF form is limited and cannot increase.
The solution is to calculate the best fit of text length at runtime instead hard coding to 100 or 120. When the text is in uppercase the length can be calculated to 90 or so. And when the text is in lower case the length can be 120 characters.

WPF has very powerful animation capabilities but in some cases, these are quite hard to use in combination with data driven content. One example is when a ContentControl is dynamically rendering a view based on a bound object in its ViewModel.
This article shows a solution where a standard ContentControl is enhanced to animate the transitions between content while still maintaining it's familiar functionality and behavior.

This little Drag & Drop Demo shows how you can modify the DataObject during a Drag & Drop operation. This is very useful if you want to provide a user interaction before you do the final drop into the destination. A good use for this would be the creation of a toolbox to add items to a destination (form, listbox, grid, etc.) where you want to customize (give a name, additional configurations, etc.) before you drop them.

MobileLPR is an LPR client library built for the .NET Compact Framework 2.0 that gives a Windows Mobile application the ability to print to an LPR (aka LPD) server, an LPRng server, or a SocketAPI printer. One thing all these protocols have in common is the use of a TCP socket to transport data. With the length of time the LPR protocol has been available, the prevalence of print server appliances and printers with internal network interfaces, and the dearth of printing solutions for mobile devices, it surprised me somewhat how little code was actually available on the web to do printing from mobile devices.

Why did I build it? After about a week of web searches yielding meager results and as my mental digestion of the relatively small LPR document improved, I decided this situation presented me with a good opportunity both to create the functionality I needed and to give a useful bit of code back to the programming community, of which I had been a beneficiary for so long.

The goal was to assemble a small, well-performing library to run in a mobile environment that contained the most useful LPR functions without being over-engineered. Some sections certainly could have been written more efficiently but that do their intended tasks. Coming from a C programming background, I know how to write very compact and cryptic code that gets the job done, but in six months even I wouldn't be able to decipher it. I aim to write maintainable code.

Image via CrunchBaseHere is implementation of Silverlight that I will be making extensive use of:

PivotViewer makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the web in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun. By visualizing thousands of related items at once, users can see trends and patterns that would be hidden when looking at one item at a time.
Because PivotViewer leverages Deep Zoom, it displays full, high-resolution content without long load times, while the animations and natural transitions provide context and prevent users from feeling overwhelmed by large quantities of information. This simple, inviting interaction model encourages exploration and longer audience engagement times, and applies broadly to a variety of content types.
Preview sample collections from our interactive demos above, that let you see first-hand how PivotViewer can transform the way we visualize data and information on the web today. You can experience a variety of four interactive demos that we have showcased, however the possibilities are endless and we know the developers and designers will delight us with the collections that they continue to build and publish.
The Silverlight PivotViewer control is available now and can be accessed by developers and designers to begin creating collections and deploying solutions.